The first half of 2025 saw Warren and me working on a multi-model commission for American Airlines to go on display in their museum as part of their centennial celebrations. This article was originally published on our own website by Warren, but BrickNerd suggested that its readers might be interested in hearing more about one section of this project: scale models of the fleet’s history.
Introduction
This part of the AA project took up a big percentage of the time. After all, what would any exhibition of an airline be without the planes that they have flown over the years?
When we started planning the exhibition, it was clear we wanted to include a number of aircraft from throughout the history of American Airlines from the earliest planes, right through to the present day. So we decided on five different planes, all iconic in one way or another. (Jump straight to the video if you’re short on time, or grab a cuppa, this is a long one!)
The Research
If I’m building a model of a current building, vehicle, or person, it’s normally fairly easy to get hold of current images or video to work from.
Usually it’s the same for anything iconic from the past. However, in some cases there is a period of time where archive images are harder to come by. Either photography wasn’t common at that time, or the item wasn’t considered iconic enough to take pictures of.
Thankfully, like many large companies, American Airlines has its own archive, and in this case, it’s at the museum where the models will go on display. So the simplest way to get the information I needed was to trawl through the archive in person!
An image from the AA archives – a dc3 flies over new york
I don’t have many photographs that I can publish from the archives (they aren’t mine to publish), but what I did manage to find were not only images of the early aircraft that American flew, but also references for paint codes, designs and layouts—which would be an essential part of the built model.
Choosing the planes
Whilst working in the archives, I concentrated on the design of the five planes that were decided upon. These would be the:
Warren, hard at work ‘ researching’ an MD81 cockpit in the AA Museum
Apart from the choice of planes themselves though, there were other things to take into consideration. Primarily the overall design and, of course, the iconic AA colour scheme.
Figuring out the colours
If you’re a LEGO fan, then you’ll know that there are quite a few colours available in the LEGO palette. Having said that, the few hundred colours that LEGO has ever used pale in comparison with the millions of colours that most people can see.
a quick visit to cabin crew training facilities to look at fuselage colours
lego ‘medium stone grey’ bricks against an AA fuselage – not a great match!
Colours only tell half the story, too. There are myriad different finishes. In fact, AA is quite famous for the polished aluminum finish of their earlier planes. In fact, as composite planes made an aluminum finish impossible, they moved to a custom paint finish to replace it—one containing reflective mica flakes.
Matching colours is actually a far more complex topic than you might expect. Companies like Pantone have made a whole industry of it. Possibly the best way to choose a brick colour, though, is to put a brick next to the real thing. But that’s a little complicated for airplanes! Thankfully, though, it turned out that the simulators used for training were painted in the same paint as the real planes. So we could check the colour and determine that the color of the plane… was not that great a match for any standard colour.
a dc3 inside the AA Museum – ideal for colour matching
Taking a small detour, I could check the polished aluminum colour quite easily. The museum actually has a DC3 inside in the original livery. So that was a simple case of holding a brick against the real plane. ‘Flat Silver’ (a semi-metallic colour) could work well.
just one of the many airplane models in the AA museum
At this point, we had one colour nailed, but the second was still ‘up in the air’.
One of the benefits of working with the owners of what you’re building is that if you need the original paint scheme, you can get it. Once we’d tracked down the current livery designs, we noticed something. The special mica paint wasn’t being used anymore! A few years earlier (but after the training simulators were painted) AA had moved to a new ‘Silver Eagle’ paint.
So, onto a new paint to match! There wasn’t a real plane I could hold bricks against. Some research gave me the original Boeing paint code and I did think about ordering some of that paint to check… until I checked the price! Way too expensive and you need special equipment to apply it.
Thankfully, there was an official Pantone match available for the new silvery paint finish which opened up a new exciting possibility…
Creating a Custom Colour
If you read our article about building a large-scale Paimon statue, you’ll know that I don’t only work with LEGO bricks. There are other brands available!
a lot of silver bricks!
In fact, for projects just like this one, I have a rather special option. We have a great relationship with an injection moulding company in China, and they can produce us any brick in any colour. That means we can make specific models in the 100% correct corporate colour. It also means that we can have bricks made that LEGO has never made—such as the large silver plates I would need for the wings.
Of course, when having a specific colour moulded, you have to purchase a minimum amount of each piece. Combining these colours with the style that I’d decided on for the final plane models would be a great combination, though. To keep things simple and based on experience, I estimated that all of the models we had planned could be built with just six different pieces if we only had them in the right colour.
So I figured out that I’d ONLY need to order 200 kg (400 lbs) of bricks to make these models, and so away we went. (We certainly will eventually use all the extra… more on that below.)
Deciding on the Style for the Models
What I did realise, though, as I was looking at all the planes in the museum, was that there was going to be a particular way we’d best represent the planes. When I’m designing a brick model, there are lots of ways to create the design. I can, for instance, use all the available bricks and get the model as close to the real thing as possible. These models can look great, but they have one key disadvantage: they often don’t look brick-built.
Inside the museum are a lot (really, loads) of model planes. They look great and are commercially produced in fiberglass or resin from the original designs. If I’m honest, putting a detailed brick-built model next to a fiberglass model would only highlight the fact that the brick-built model wasn’t quite correct. So, in this instance, we determined it would be better to accentuate the material and make sure that the model looked like it was built from bricks.
Representing the Evolution of the Livery
So, we have bricks, colours, and a style. What’s left? Well, each plane would represent the livery of that period. So I had five liveries to recreate. Over the years, these liveries have been designed in a variety of ways, from pen and paper layouts right through to modern designs created in CAD.
Whilst the LEGO models are obviously very close to the real thing, there are certain changes I needed to make in order to account for the dimensions of the bricks. So the next thing was to take the original livery and adjust it just enough to match the model. Using a combination of Adobe Illustrator, our Roland UV printer and a lot of experience, these designs were printed out onto the correct bricks ready for the build.
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The AA ‘Eagle’ print
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The original 707 livery (blurred)
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The A321 tailplane print
Finalising how the planes will be displayed
There was now just one thing left to complete: the models. Airplanes belong in the air, so we wanted to mount each model onto a display stand. We’d also need to be able to take the models apart into sections for transport (some assembly required). When building a model designed to come apart, there are a few ways to do so. In this instance, we chose traditional (and literal) nuts and bolts as they could be easily replaceable if needed. Mounting those to LEGO, of course, needs some special fixings.
To create these fixings, I decided to turn to our Bambu Lab X1C. We’ve been asked for years if we use 3D printing, and honestly, no. Until recently, we’d never really created any parts in a 3D printer. This turned out to be the ideal solution for this project, though. We determined that a highly custom mounting bracket would sit atop the heavy-duty stand (these planes are heavy!). Custom hexagonal mounts would secure standard nuts inside the plane fuselages to assemble the planes.
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The Build
Finally, it was time to put some bricks together! If it feels like it’s taken quite some time to get here, then you’re right. It did take quite a while to develop all of this. Now, though, the bricks are flying! I’ve time-lapsed the entire process for the Boeing 787. Just imagine having to do this five times in a row…
Obviously, each plane uses a different number of bricks, depending on its size, but the most time-consuming part of this build was actually figuring out how to build the correct shape with only the six brick types I’d ordered! (Oh, and that lovely, shiny colour looked fabulous.) On the flip side, it is also a sprayed finish, so it made using solvent to bind bricks together a bit more complicated.
The Transit Packaging
With the planes finished, there was one last thing to do. My fleet wasn’t going to fly itself to Dallas, sadly, so they’d need to be packed up securely to get there. The planes were also very likely to move on from the museum in Dallas to other locations, so re-usable packaging was needed. Whilst we can supply full ATA flightcases with custom CNC’d inserts, they aren’t the cheapest of solutions.
the dc3 packed in shadowfoam
We found the better solution to be Shadowfoam, which is normally used for securing tools in toolboxes. It took a while (OK, ages!), but we created custom packaging for each plane. Packaging like this makes it easy to pack everything correctly and identify any missing parts.
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Then the boxes were shipped, and that was it! Five planes, five eras, five liveries and five transport cases. The DC3, 707, MD81, A321 and 787 were packed and ready to fly again!
Postscript
In case you were wondering, no. We absolutely do not waste the extra bricks we had to make that weren’t used in AA’s models. Although the special metallic colours aren’t something we can usually use on the outside of another model, we 100% can use them on the inside.
In the case that we can’t re-use the bricks ourselves for some reason, we donate them to local charities and schools. If we can’t give them away (perhaps glued parts) then we can send the bricks to a plastics recycler. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle!
If you’re interested in the other parts of this project, you can find them on our blog here:
Bricks Now Boarding, Part 1: American Airlines in LEGO Bricks
Bricks Now Boarding, Part 2: Destinations
Bricks Now Boarding, Part 3: Familiar Team Experiences
Bricks Now Boarding Part, 4: Airport Lounge
What custom color brick would you create if you could? Let us know in the comments below.
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